Back to the here and now, yeah

Off to Magical Mondays this morning, Davies brought Crazy Frog with us, having got me to label his foot with ‘Davies’ just incase someone else happened to have brought one along too or found his and thought maybe it was theirs by mistake or something ;). I have to say I would be slightly more inclined to let that one go than the sonic screwdriver actually, but never mind :lol:.

I sat and did some drawing with Davies and Scarlett – there were some wooden shapes to stencil round so Davies did a penguin and then decided to turn it into something else. I was really impressed with his very confident lines he drew, with a very clear idea in his head of what he wanted. It looked to me like a cross between Angel Gabriel (cool name that ;)) or the Angel of the North so after checking it wasn’t Penguin Gabriel or the Penguin of the North I gave up guessing and he coloured it in and added detail creating a toucan instead. He then added various details around it to give it a habitat (a term we were discussing yesterday and has taken his fancy so is now into everything’s habitat) complete with insulation against the snow and a person juggling snowballs outside. Lots of his drawings put me in mind of Lucy in the sky with diamonds actually with more than a touch of the surreal about them at times, mixed with an odd sort of 7 year olds logic. Scarlett drew round a monkey which she coloured in beautifully using a mix of fluorescent yellow, pink, green and blue and to which she added a polar bear with claws, a blue lion, a giraffe so tall that it’s head went off the page and her name perfectly formed across the bottom – so equally planned out and achieving her exact aim but equally surreal to me :lol:. I am incapable of sitting with pens and paper and not drawing but was uninspired by the wooden shapes so copied the Crazy Frog toy and drew that instead. Davies liked the idea of that and wanted me to draw him one to colour in but instead I persuaded him to come and sit with me and I talked him through drawing it himself. We’ve not done anything like still life or indeed other art types before really and whereas I’m quite good at a reasonable copy of something he is good at drawing from memory or imagination but I showed him how to pick a bit to start with and build the drawing up around it, looking at a few bits which you are going to focus on and he did a really good job.

Davies then wandered off to do some baking with Eira (fruit scones) and Scarlett stuck around to draw a bit more and I meandered off to drink more tea and chat to adults. Eira came back to say she’d enjoyed the one to one with Davies, which isn’t the first time someone’s said that about him in the last few days and I’ve enjoyed a couple of conversations with him recently too, he’s been very pensive and ‘thinky’ which always makes for insightful and interesting observations from children I think. He seems to have a bit of a following from the younger children at MMs and took them all off to the cloakroom area today where they were closeted away, apparently playing Doctor Who and being occassionaly led out and paraded round by Davies before closeting themselves away again.

We left there having issued an invite to Lucy to come back to ours which she did bringing just one R (younger) and after a while the children disappeared upstairs to play leaving Lucy and I a chance, albeit a fairly regularly interupted one, to catch up a bit. They left, Davies and Scarlett stayed upstairs for a good while afterwards, had a bit of a kerfuffle about tidying up which they pretty much resolved themselves and then returned downstairs again. I got their opinion on something I was messing about playing with and then they sat down to watch tv and have an early tea before it was time to walk Davies round to Beavers.

Scarlett had a bath while Davies was gone and I was invited in to watch her ‘Diving Show’ which involved lots of splashing and spluttering but some fairly impressive staying under the water moves too. Ady arrived home from a very trying first day back at work after a holiday and he went round to collect Davies from Beavers. He had a bath while Scarlett and I had a very long and wearing debate about rewards and punishment and why I would like her to do stuff when I ask her because she wants to and can understand the reason for it instead of me threatening or bribing or coercing her into it. Ady was all for removal of dummies but by the end of my very long and tactical chatting he was in awe – way hey, thanks Alfie Kohn! She went off to bed after lengthy making up cuddles, Davies had hot chocolate and The Simspons and then he went to bed too.

Tomorrow is phase two of operation playroom with the aim being to get the table cleared and ready to receive the laptops. I also have a massive pile of ebay stuff to try and get listed and general day at home type stuff.